CeraWiki:Languages
According to our Criteria for inclusion, Wiktionary is intended to include all words in all languages. Languages may be differentiated through their names, or by codes formed by a few letters. See Wiktionary:Dialects and Wiktionary:Families for discussions of dialects and of language families, respectively. Language codes Language codes are found in topical categories, language-exclusive templates, etymologies, among other pages. There are also situations where language names are used instead. Each language code is stored in a different template, the name being the code itself. When the template is called, the result is the language name, which may or not be automatically linked to the related Wiktionary entry. For example, when called, the template returns . All language code templates are at Category:Language templates. The space of three letter templates is reserved, with a few exceptions, for language code templates as they do change through time. . Code assignment * Wiktionary language codes come primarily from ISO 639-1, a series of two-letter codes which covers 136 major languages. For other languages, we use ISO 639-3, a series of three-letter codes which grew out of the Ethnologue codes and covers thousands of languages. When, according to our criteria for inclusion, a language is constructed and merits to be defined only in appendices, its template is prefixed with conl:. When a language is a reconstructed ancestor of all languages of a family, its template is prefixed with proto:. *: Examples: *:: en is stored at and represents . *:: fa is stored at and represents . *::ang is stored at and represents . *:: cmn is stored at and represents . *:: sjn is stored at and represents . *:: gem=pro is stored at and represents . * An exceptional language code may simply come from ISO 639-2, from deprecated ISO 639-1, from deprecated ISO 639-3 or from the Wikimedia language codes. *: Examples: *:: cbk-zam is stored at and represents . *:: mo is stored at and represents . *:: nah is stored at and represents . *:: nds-nl is stored at and represents . *:: sh is stored at and represents . * Otherwise, the exceptional language code must start with a related ISO 639-5 code. Then, it must be followed by - (an ordinary hyphen) and an extension formed by a few lower case letters. (Therefore, no digits, upper case letters, etc; IANA tags allow these, case independent, but Mediawiki software is more restrictive.) *: Examples: *:: cpe-spp is stored at and represents . *:: roa-gal is stored at and represents . *:: zls-mon is stored at and represents . * Any specific code derived from community consensus and not directly from ISO, is an exceptional code. *: Examples: *:: zh is stored at and represents (not Chinese, due to consensus). *:: zhx-zho is stored at and represents . Finding the code for a language If you don't know the code for a language, you can look it up at Wiktionary:Index to templates/languages. That page lists all possible language codes used on Wiktionary, along with their names. The page is very long, however, and it may be very slow to load on less powerful computers. It is also not possible to automate it in this way using templates. For that reason the template can be used instead. It takes one parameter, which is the name of the language, and it returns the code if there is one, or nothing if it can't find any code for that language. So, for example, becomes en, which is the language code for English. To use it, you can either include it on a page and preview or submit it (preferably in the Sandbox), or you can go to and type it in there. Language names Language names are found in entry translations, lexical categories, appendices, rhymes, among other pages. There are also situations where language codes are used instead. * All language names should be defined as English words in their respective Wiktionary entries. * Each language is consistently referred by only one name, to be used in translations, etymologies and elsewhere. When there are two or more possible names, one of them is chosen. * The name is chosen by consensus. Common guidelines are to avoid abbreviations, the words "Modern" and "Standard", diacritics and parentheses when possible. * Multiple names of languages should also eventually be listed in the sections synonyms or alternative forms at each entry. * Language names from language codes may be linked, to become easier to find information about these languages as Wiktionary entries. Most of them are linked by default, except for those listed at Wiktionary:Translations/Wikification. List of languages List of languages with exceptional codes List of appendix-only constructed languages List of languages with multiple names See also * Wiktionary:Dialects * Wiktionary:Families